Another Silicon Valley landmark that is not far from these PA locations is the former site of William Shockley's transistor lab at 391 San Antonio Rd in Mountain View.
http://www.mv-voice.com/story.php?story_id=7801

I agree, we are all a bit too touchy today aren't we?
Who invented what first or who contributed the most; was it Ward, Loomis, Tesla, De Forest, Armstrong, Edison or whomever?
The list of contested inventors and whether or not they thouroghly understood their inventions is not the subject but the fact that they all contributed something cannot be ignored and to call LDF a confidence man serves nothing.
Case in point, after 50 or so years I still don't understand women and probably never will but I still endeavor to be interested and fascinated by them and enjoy them and I would never think to call one a bad name.

Hmmm...touchy....and maybe a little bit arrogant?
Some details of Brian's errors would be appreciated. I couldn't find anything worth writing home about.
And where did you find the spell checker? I'd love to have one here...
I don't want to revise history but I do think history is unkind to some whose contribution to the technology was as great as the inventor.

They're both in the same category I think. Both were the first to demonstrate something of great use, but both were not the people who developed it fully. The guys who did are just as worth of praise, but in this world no-one remembers who came 2nd...

Brian--
Please engage an editor to fix your number, tense, and other problems--or proofread your own creations.
For the rest of you engineering history revisionists--if you can't identify the year the triode was invented and demonstrated, or you can't figure out who went on record via a patent as having done so, then stop posting nonsense.
By the way, in one of the ultimate insults to to the history of technology, the spell-checker at this site does not recognize the word triode. Idiot software geeks.
Best regards,
Matthew Cottrell

For myself, I've always found solid-state devices easier to understand than bits of glass and wires filled with a vacuum.
Especially when you have 2 pairs of EL34s (6CA7s over there) pumping out 20W into a nice pair of speakers. 20 Watts?? from a vacuum?? C'mon, that's black magic....

Good points (especially about the patents - he apparently got one for a device with the grid wires outside the plate...) but he did first come up with a working device and did practical demonstrations of it before the lawsuit in 1916.
As for veneration, I'd go with the Wikipedia assertion that "De Forest is ONE of the fathers of the electronic age" (my caps). Armstrong was obviously another of them and I'd agree that he's been a bit short changed by history here.

Indeed! In fact, transisors and FETs are themselves triodes, but they have the same type of characteristic curves as pentodes.
Bipolar transistors use current instead of voltage as the "valve's" throttling mechanism, but in the greater scheme of things, that's just a detail difference.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.